World – Class Botanical Garden for Australia’s Wet Tropic’s World Heritage Area Media Release The world’s leading environmental philanthropist to speak at Port Douglas Doug Tompkins has conserved and restored around 1million hectares of valuable wilderness areas and degraded farmlands in Chile and Argentina, demonstrating the effectiveness of commercially viable best practice ecological agricultural systems integrated with landscape conservation. His proven experiences are very relevant Far North Queensland in showing how farming practices can work effectively with our two world heritage areas, the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics. Doug and his wife Kris have stated: ‘The mantra of “conservation as a consequence of production” has guided our work to restore and return productivity to a number of farms and estancias in Argentina. Both through The Conservation Land Trust and on our personal farms, our teams implement diverse, organic farming practices that do not degrade, and help return wildness to the agricultural landscape.’ Doug is probably best known in Australia, from his previous visits, for his stance again the whaling in the Southern Oceans. He has been involved with the Sea Shepherd foundation and worked as crew on the Steve Irwin to prevent the slaughter of whales. Doug Tompkins most significant environmental activity has involved for buying up and conserving nearly a million hectares of rare and endangered forest types in southern Chile and Argentina. He has donated many of these large tracts of forests to the governments to become significant National Parks consequently conserving some of the world’s most important remaining areas of key Gondwana Land biodiversity. Doug was a very successful businessman founding North Face and later Esprit and was involved in turning both of them into multi-billion dollar international companies. He sold his interests in these business and used the funds to start the Deep Ecology Foundation and Tompkins Conservation. His other passion is purchasing degraded farm lands and restoring them into commercially successful organic farms run on the principles of agroecology. He is actively involved in the publication of wonderful photo essay books on conservation, sustainable production and on unsustainable production systems. His best known book in Australia is Fatal Harvest. He will be showing a video and giving a presentation on his most recent activities at the Port Douglas Community Centre on the evening of Oct 3 at 6.30pm. It will also be an opportunity to meet him, ask questions and talk. Doug has won numerous important international awards for his activities. He has been featured in the major media around the world, such as the New York Times, Guardian, Newsweek, Time and many others for his considerable contribution to landscape scale conservation. Entry is a gold coin and the proceeds will go towards the Mossman Botanical Gardens For Interviews with Doug: +54 9 3437 493374. For more information on the numerous activities of Tompkins Conservation: tompkinsconservation.org For details about the event: Alan and Susan Carle, The Botanical Ark Phone: 40988174, or info@botanicalark Press release issued by: Mossman Botanic Gardens, Inc. Various issues from 24, September, 2013
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 02:40:11 +0000